February 1, 2013

THE
POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE***/****
Image B+
Sound A
Extras Astarring Lana Turner, John
Garfield, Cecil Kellaway, Hume Cronynscreenplay by Harry Ruskin
and Niven Busch, based on the novel by James M. Caindirected by Tay Garnett

THE
RAINS OF RANCHIPUR**½/****
Image A
Sound A
Extras Bstarring Lana Turner,
Richard Burton, Fred MacMurray, Michael Renniescreenplay by Merle Miller,
based on the novel by Louis Bromfielddirected by Jean Negulesco

click
any image to enlarge

by
Jefferson Robbins There's a series
of doublings in The
Postman Always Rings Twice, Lana Turner's best-known
vehicle, that
illuminate its obscure title. Disillusioned young wife Cora Smith
(Turner) and
drift-through handyman Frank Chambers (John Garfield) try twice to make
way for
their illicit love by eliminating her diner-impresario husband, Nick
(Cecil
Kellaway). There are two court cases steered by suspicious chief
prosecutor
Sackett (Leon Ames) and defended by wonderfully shifty lawyer Arthur
"I'm
Handling It" Keats (Hume Cronyn). There are two moonlight swims, each a
turning
point in the criminal couple's courtship. Twice the action bends when
ailing
female relatives, never seen, summon a main character to their
sickbeds. There
are even two roadside-diner femmes fatale: Cora,
and her
double Madge (Audrey Totter), who diverts Frank while he's on the outs
with the
woman he killed to obtain. Finally, the murder itself creates a literal
echo.
These aren't anvils falling from the heavens, but instead
the patterns
life presents only in retrospect: This moment, that
day, that was
when God was trying to get my attention. Like Frank, we're too
preoccupied to
ever hear the first ring.

Frank, and the
audiences of 1946, gasped at their first sight of Turner, ushered in
and out of
the picture by a rolling tube of lipstick. I did, too, but mostly
because I
couldn't figure out what the hell she was wearing. Turns out the turban
and
shorts jumper are her standard diner uniform, which...okay. Tay
Garnett's adaptation of the James M. Cain novel gets
placed high in the film noir pantheon,
and while it qualifies chronologically, it goes sideways from the
template. The
sun-washed seaside setting, for instance, is far from urban
darkness--Frank and
Cora orbit Los Angeles, but their story is very much apart from it.
Turner's
Cora is no duplicitous schemer, but a naïf necessarily hardened by a
decade of
persistent male sexual threat. (Her story parallels Turner's biography
in many
ways.) Neither party actively leads the other astray; there are no
hidden
motives, just distrust planted by Sackett and Keats, who more or less
collude
to settle a private bet rather than observe justice. There's an
insurance
policy that draws Sackett's suspicions, though it's not the goal of the
plot.
The affair appears to take hold with Nick's encouragement, if not his
spoken consent:
"I didn't expect you back so soon," he remarks once they return from
their first nightswim, before bundling himself away to bed without his
wife.
Finally, Cora would have better luck getting away with midnight murder
were she
not always clothed in blazing white. These are characters who don't know
they're
in a noir.
When a new neon sign pulses its light over Frank and Cora,
they're
symbolically tipped into that unknown, dangerous genre.

The movie also
seeks a redemptive spark, with both Cora and Frank groping towards some
kind of
moral conclusion. This differs from the common postwar noirs,
which usually left their survivors crushed and crippled from the
wringer they'd
just crawled through. Frank and Cora, by contrast, refuse to be weighed
down by
the cynicism that is noir's stock
and trade. Happiness is within their grasp--or, at film's end, within
Frank's
grasp alone--perhaps because they're cushioned by simple-mindedness or
denial.
My own feeling is that Postman's hopeful
heavenward glance is a sop to
audiences, a fatal weakening of nerve that disavows the inherent
grimness of
the genre. This was from prestige studio MGM, after all, not known for
the grit
of Warners. Frank's jailhouse conversion
throws the viewer off his bearings, unsubtly. It's what keeps the picture,
in my
mind, from four-star status, despite all the repercussions it's had in
crime
thrillers since.

Jean Negulesco's
caste-porn melodrama The
Rains of Ranchipur is lesser Turner, to be sure, and it
finds the
sultry star--thirty-four at the time of release--simultaneously shored
up and
undermined by the introduction of a younger ingénue. There's vast
promise in
its beginning, as Lady Edwina Esketh (Turner) frostily entertains a
visit from
husband Lord Alan (Michael Rennie) in her private compartment on an
Indian rail
journey. In a fraught, single-take exchange punctuated by Rennie's
expert
fashioning of a café
diablo, the premise of their relationship is laid bare: The
titled man
without wealth and the rich but cruel temptress have settled into a
grudgingly
open marriage, conjoined in cuckoldry. This type of interior two-shot
is the
worst possible use of the then ultra-wide CinemaScope aspect ratio, one
Negulesco returns to all too often (although his camera also
glides well when called upon), but
Turner
transfixes (as was her gift) as an unmoved confessor, and Rennie,
stately edifice that he is, bares Alan's soul eloquently. He's Postman's
Nick all over again, only with his pride unsettled. It's the first, and
best, of
the film's many long, looooong self-disclosing soliloquies. Although we
don't
necessarily wish a loving marriage for these two, we do want
to see where
their estrangement leads them.

Straight into
exotic weeper country, it turns out, as a horse-shopping jaunt to the
estate of
a widowed Maharani (Eugenie Leontovich, the first of a few blue-eyed
South
Asians we'll meet) leads to an encounter with too-good-to-be-true
Indian
physician Rama Safti (a turbaned and bronzed Richard Burton), the
Maharani's
surrogate son and the next pretty thing to catch Edwina's fickle eye.
The
sparks strike, as they will when Turner shows off some shoulder in a
pink
single-strap evening gown; the crucial exchange of glances between her
and
Burton, as they watch a dance display in the Maharani's palace, is
electric.
Among Safti's local pals is American side-plot Tom Ransome (Fred
MacMurray),
once a brilliant engineer whose only joy now is a stiff scotch on his
veranda--or wherever, really. Tugging at Ransome's shoelaces comes yet
another expat,
perky Midwestern missionary Fern Simon (Joan Caulfield, the
second-fiddle sex
appeal mentioned above), who aims to unpickle his heart, for the
apparent
reason that she's cute and he's there, because God forbid two Americans
in India fall in love with anyone but each other. Edwina is the
transgressive
wrinkle in this fabric, a documented race tourist (her past conquests
include
a presumably also
dusky-skinned Argentinean she met on her honeymoon with Alan) whose
initial carnal intent towards the achingly noble Safti
quickly gives way to romantic love. Or so she tells us.

This film set in
the caste-conscious subcontinent is maddeningly uncertain
about Safti's
place in the culture, using his turban--worn for different reasons by
different
subcommunities--to signal, simply, "Indian." (He's not an orthodox
Sikh, for instance, since his hair is later shown closely cut. Still, a
turban
suits Burton better than it does Turner.) In some seriously
middle-school environmental
symbolism, zoology, climate, epidemiology, and plate tectonics reflect
and
prefigure their passions. A near-strike by a cobra signals the venom of
forbidden love; the monsoons torrent down just as a tiger mauls the
unmanned Alan on a Hemingway-lite safari; an earthquake
tumbles the province as
Edwina inspires the men around her to violence; and a near-fatal fever
lifts
when a crucial dam is burst.

To its credit, The Rains of
Ranchipur makes
clear that it's selfish Edwina who's the roadblock in Safti's path to
improving
his country and does not write off the doomed relationship to India's
closed
"exoticism." Unfortunately, all this tumult fails to inspire a lick
of sympathy for almost any of the characters--Alan being the obvious
exception--and
Edwina still fails to put the concerns of, say, a few hundred drowned
Untouchables above her own. Of the contemporary transcontinental
weepers, The
Rains of Ranchipur reminds most of The English
Patient, with its
all-important Anglo love triangle set off against easily-ignored
colonial
upheaval. The cast truly sells the lengthy confessional monologues
(Turner is
the only actor spared one of these), but there's no counteracting the
sheer
number of them, and they add up to no larger picture. Not enough
of a picture, at least, to merit the vast CinemaScope frame.

THE
BLU-RAY DISCS
Visually and
sonically, Warner's 1.37:1, 1080p Blu-ray version of the original The
Postman Always Rings Twice
doesn't offer much my 2003 DVD edition couldn't afford. Day-for-night
scenes
appear more lucid, however, and overall picture quality keeps detail
clear
without notable edge enhancement. The print is clean if prone to some
softness
from the original lensing, while a sheet of grain persists, sometimes
overbearingly so. It's not a dealbreaker, but it does make one question
whether a HiDef product shouldn't look just a bit cleaner.
The sunny setting means there's not a lot of contrast to compare the
handling
of light and dark, though shadowier scenes never lose too much detail.
And I can
say that this disc finally lets me see the weapon that Frank gives Cora
to carry
out their murder plan--a sap straight out of the pulps: a little bag
loaded
with ball bearings. The 1.0 DTS-HD MA track means never having to back
up to
catch one of Garfield's mumbles or Turner's babyish purrs, and the
score by
George Bassman shares the soundfield generously.

Where the disc
excels is in repurposing biographical extras within the special
features. All are
ten years old or more, all standard definition, drawn from prior DVD
editions
or Turner Classic Movies programming, but they're welcome
additions--particularly
"Lana Turner... A Daughter's Memoir" (86 mins.), a definitive 2001
bio of the radiant and deeply-troubled actress. For every grand leap
forward in
her career, her not-so-private life suffered a crushing blow; by the
time
the silly slo-mo re-enactments kick in to dramatize events around the
death of
ogreish Johnny Stompanato, we're already marvelling that she survived.
(The
public court imbroglio that followed Stompanato's death probably did
more to
crystallize the anguish of domestic abuse for a generation of women
than any
other moment of the 1950s.) The
sit-down testimonials alone are a who's-who: Kirk Douglas, Robert
Stack, Jackie
Cooper, and Turner's wonderfully forthright daughter Cheryl Crane mark
the
chapters in her life, but best of all is Juanita Moore, Turner's
bedrock in Imitation
of Life, disclosing the catharsis the star gained from that
movie's pivotal
death scene. Though Crane suffered vastly at the hands of Turner's
partners, the doc reveals that Turner wanted to go to the
morgue to view Stompanato's body rather than see to Crane--a touch that
reminds
me of how the ambulance in Postman takes
Nick to the mortuary before bothering to transport a concussed Frank to
the
hospital.

Turner's Postman co-star
gets his moment too in the 57-minute "John Garfield Story", lifted
from the film's 2004 DVD release, in which the actor's own struggles
with
typecasting, a weak heart, and the fatal harassment of HUAC receive a
going-over. Easier to list which luminaries don't have something to say
about
Garfield, for his eulogists include Richard Dreyfuss, Lee Grant, Joanne
Woodward,
Harvey Keitel (his nearest contemporary heir?), Danny Glover, Norman
Lloyd,
Martin Scorsese, James Cromwell, Patricia Neal and Hume Cronyn.
"Phantoms,
Inc." (16 mins.) is an unrelated "Crime Does Not Pay Subject"--it
probably unspooled ahead of Postman or
films of its like--about con artists, which is fitting, given that was
Turner's
father's career before it got his head busted open. Tex Avery's classic
Red
Hot Riding Hood cartoon heats up the old folktale in
wolf-whistling Stork
Club style (7 mins.), and there's a 29-minute radio adaptation of The
Postman Always Rings Twice, voiced by the film's stars and
aired in June of 1946. The two-minute theatrical trailer is onboard, as is an
enlightening 2003
introduction by film scholar Richard Jewell, again ported over from the
DVD.
The cover art, with a retouched, colorized publicity still,
disappoints.
I prefer my old snapper DVD with its painted poster art and breathless
tagline, "Their Love was a Flame that Destroyed!"

Twilight Time, distributing limited-edition BDs of neglected
Fox and Columbia titles, does right by The
Rains of Ranchipur as it did Bell, Book, and Candle
last
spring. Everyone looks quite tan, a way of saying the pinks one might
expect to show up in fleshtones are largely absent outside of Turner's
rouge. The 2.55:1, 1080p image is smooth and lacking obtrusive grain
save in a few
obviously-second-unit shots, while the transfer's treatment of colour--the
golds and ebonies of the Maharani's palace, the glowing aqua of Safti's
mid-film turban, the science-fiction sheerness of...whatever that thing
Turner has on in her train compartment--is largely adoring.
Originally released in four-track
stereo, Ranchipur's 4.0 DTS-HD Master Audio track
really shakes things up when the earthquake and
rainstorms hit, and there's a pleasing directionality to the mix.
Composer
Hugo Friedhofer gets some love with an isolated score, demonstrating
how
much character his music contributed to the project. Extras beyond that
point
grow scarce: three breathless HiDef trailers ("Shattering all barriers
of
race and time!"), each clocking in at 2:34 and practically identical
but for one of them being in black-and-white; and a clickthrough
catalogue that lists
Twilight Time's small but admirable inventory. Essayist Julie Kirgo
contributes
another valuable analysis in the insert booklet, this time viewing The
Rains of Ranchipur through the lens of Negulesco's rather
swashbuckling
life. This
cover, it should be said, replicates the film's original poster art,
with a brown Burton-Indian nuzzling a stylized Turner's arched neck. Yes.